(in multiple parts)
Part I of “Ambedkar, Religion, and Islam”
B. R. Ambedkar
“There is no doubt in my mind that in the majority of quarrels”, wrote a famous Indian, “the Hindus come out second best. My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Mussulman [the everyday Hindustani world for Muslim] as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward.” These rather querulous words belong to Mohandas Gandhi, writing at the tail end of the Khilafat Movement at a difficult moment in the struggle for Hindu-Muslim unity, a subject which was to preoccupy Gandhi his entire adult life in India. But they could just as easily have emanated from the pen of B. R. [Babasaheb] Ambedkar, whose withering critiques of caste Hindu society are now part of the commonsense of the liberal and secular Hindu worldview but whose views on Islam, and more specifically on the history of Muslims in India, have received little critical scrutiny. Ambedkar would almost certainly have contested whether there is even such a thing as a “liberal and secular Hindu”, but let that pass: what cannot, however, be doubted is that, beyond seeing Hindu-Muslim unity as a chimera, he was predisposed, and for good reasons, towards viewing nearly everything from the standpoint of the Dalits. His observations at the First Round Table Conference in London, held between November 1930 and January 1931, are telling in this respect: “The Depressed Classes welcomed the British as their deliverers from age-long tyranny and oppression by the orthodox Hindus. They fought their battle against the Hindus, the Mussalmans and the Sikhs, and won for them this great Empire of India.” The particular manner in which Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are, without any fanfare, merely placed in apposition to each other points to Ambedkar’s own priorities and the historical and philosophical viewpoint from which he assessed the Indian past. He earmarked the Hindu as the eternal and mortal foe of the Dalits, their unrepentant and degenerate oppressor, but, for reasons that he would delve into here and there, he also found it difficult to embrace Sikhs and Muslims, religious minorities in India, as brothers bound together in a fellowship of suffering.
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